The Latest Action Heroes

Only problem: so far, nobody in Hollywood has figured out how to make a game into a movie – and make it work.

The US headquarters of Capcom, the videogame firm that makes the popular Street Fighter series of games, lies in a flat office-park corridor off US 101 in Sunnyvale, California, surrounded by the corporate hives of more venerable firms like Amdahl and Hewlett-Packard.

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You might hold a technical conclave here; certainly a marketing meeting. But a Hollywood press conference and movie-launch party? Where'd we take the wrong turn?

Capcom has spent US$40 million to make a movie based on Street Fighter, and it's determined to get its money's worth of show-biz glory. So on this Thursday, late in September, it has gathered executives and actors and journalists – and even a couple of kids – to fete the film.

Waiters in martial-arts robes serve sushi while the Super Street Fighter II Turbo arcade machines lining the walls flash their messages of challenge: Attack me if you dare. I will crush you. Watch them long enough and they'll also inform you that Winners don't do drugs. A boy in baggy pants – maybe 10 or 11 years old – makes a beeline for the games. The adults stare from a respectful distance.

Jean-Claude Van Damme, who plays Street Fighter's hero, Colonel Guile, is in Pittsburgh, shooting another movie, and sends his videotaped regrets. And the press conference's big draw, fleet-footed San Francisco 49ers star Deion Sanders, who has recorded a rap number for the film's soundtrack with his chum Hammer, is a no-show: he twisted his ankle during practice the day before.

In the new world of interchangeable, interdependent entertainment modules – athlete performs four songs on soundtrack to movie based on videogame! – a football injury can have unexpected repercussions.

I'm here looking for some insight into the growing practice of adapting games into movies. There are plenty of them – Double Dragon, from Gramercy Pictures, in fall '94; Street Fighter, which Universal was to put in 2,000 theaters this Christmas; Mortal Kombat, from New Line, in spring '95. Beyond these loom movies based on Doom, the shareware phenom, and Myst, the fantasy-realm CD-ROM hit.

So far, though, insights are not exactly jumping out at me. Capcom's Director of Licensing, Jun Aida, mentions that the company has adapted digitized images of the movie's cast for use in the next arcade version of Street Fighter. It's the old marketing dream of synergy, turned into a closed loop of name-recognition feedback.

You've played the game; now see the movie.

And then: You've seen the movie; now play the movie character in the game!

There's only one problem: the sole representative of the target market here doesn't sound like he's buying it. "You mentioned changing Colonel Guile around so he'll look like Van Damme," asks the young game player when the press conference turns to Q&A. There's a suspicious note in his voice. "What did you mean by that?"

In the game, Colonel Guile is a muscle-bound cartoon, a punked-out, surf-dude GI Joe with a canary-yellow flattop you could land a helicopter on. In the movie, Guile is Van Damme.

So, the $40 million question is, Will the junior Street Fighters who made Capcom's game a hit knuckle under to such changes? Or will they accept no substitutions?

Movies about games have almost always been flops: The Wizard (1989), The Last Starfighter (1984), even the ambitious-for-its-time but deadly dull Tron (1982).

In Hollywood's long-term memory, the history of videogame adaptations begins way back in the summer of 1993, when Disney's $46 million movie based on Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers games met a sudden, spectacular death at the box office.

Maybe that happened because in the time it took to get the movie made, Sonic the Hedgehog had become more popular than Mario. More likely, it was just that the film was awful. Either way, for a time the conventional wisdom in Hollywood became: you can't make a movie based on a videogame.

But that couldn't last – not given the level of entertainment-industry hype for all things interactive, and not given the sheer economic clout of a videogame business with larger grosses than the movie business. In 1994, game deals suddenly became trendy in Hollywood. Where once the traffic between the film and game industries was strictly one-way – "We'll make the movies," the studios would say, "and then you can pay us to license the game rights" – now it moves in both directions.

For example, Id Software, maker of Doom, has a movie deal with producer Ivan Reitman. There's no production schedule yet, but Id's Jay Wilbur says the company hopes a film will help the game "break out and become more of a household word." What if the movie fails? "We've done what we set out to do with the game," Wilbur answers. "The rest is extra pudding."

A "feeding frenzy" earlier this year to close a movie deal for Myst made the game's creators, brothers Rand and Robyn Miller of Cyan, call a time out. "It got a little out of hand," says Rand Miller. "We were selling things that people hadn't even seen yet, and we were worried about keeping control of the quality. We don't want this to just get thrown together because Myst is hot." The Millers's plan now is to produce a trilogy of Myst books first – they've got a $1 million book deal with Hyperion.

All too frequently in Hollywood, the Miller brothers faced generalizing questions about plot. "That was a little depressing to us," Rand says, "because we know exactly what the movie is, what the back-story is. So we wanted to step back and say, 'Let us get the book done and then when you read it, you'll see what you can make a movie from.'"

In any case, long before either Doom or Myst hits the screens, the success or failure of the wave of game adaptations preceding them will determine whether the game-to-movie concept remains hot in Hollywood.

The fighting games leading this wave are a breed apart from the games I was addicted to 15 years ago – Asteroids and Space Invaders. After all, nobody was going to try to build a movie around a stick-figure spaceship or a horde of bleeping blobs. But Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, arcade sensations that became bestselling home cartridges as well, are a different story. They've got rudimentary casts of fighters with differing abilities and traits – there's even an occasional female character, like Street Fighter's Chun Li, with her deadly "whirlwind kick" (stand on head, spread legs 180 degrees, point toes, and spin like a top). It's not that much of a stretch to imagine the world of high-end fighting games bleeding into the realm of low-end action movies – one pop continuum.

There's a hitch, though. So far, nobody in Hollywood has figured out how to make a game into a movie and how to make it work: to recreate that adrenaline-forged link between a twitching finger and an active screen. At the same time, the games don't provide filmmakers with many of the elements that make movies work – like gripping narratives and absorbing characters.

"Translating a videogame into a movie is like translating an Ethan Allen furniture catalog into a movie," says Michael Backes, screenwriter and co-founder of Rocket Science Games. "Videogames are often very much about environments and not so much about character interaction. So it's difficult to come up with a believable, dramatic, and emotional conflict. I think they're going to find that it's a more difficult area to mine than they think. There'll be some exceptions, but most of this stuff will be crap."

Game players will surely forgive cheesy stories and crude characterizations because they get something that movies don't offer – involvement and feedback. But why would anyone want to watch a big movie image of Mario or one of the Street Fighters without a button to press?

Everyone has an answer, or at least a theory.

The Theory of Properties: In Hollywood, the standard answer is to declare that there is no question. A videogame, the argument goes, should be treated as a property, just like any other.

"It's an adaptation," says Steven de Souza, the writer-director of Street Fighter. "You look at the original material, which is going to be a novel or a comic book, or a Broadway show, or a straight play. And you ask, What works as a movie and what doesn't? What translates into this particular medium and what doesn't?"

With Street Fighter, de Souza says, what translated were the characters, some of their costumes and some of the game's "sets," or backgrounds.

"The only way the movie could disappoint a kid is if the kid were to say, 'I really wanted to see character A fight character B, and that didn't happen.' But there are 16 characters, and they can't all fight each other. So I'm already in trouble. But they can go see that in the arcade. What I can give them is all the things that happen when the characters aren't beating each other into submission – relationships and fun and romance and danger. You know, movie stuff. The characters all have external lives. Everybody has a day job."

Larry Kasanoff, the producer who's making the Mortal Kombat film for New Line, takes a similar tact. "This videogame is popular because it's got great characters and great playability – and, frankly, some really cool violent finishing moves that are kind of fun." (The viscera-ripping, blood-spattering finishing moves are what turned Mortal Kombat into Exhibit A of the videogame violence debate.) "What can I translate into a movie? With great stories and great characters, I can do better. I have a better idea for the finishing moves, too – you're going to learn what really happens, with state-of-the-art special effects. Playability I can't do at all, and I don't want to. It's not that kind of medium."

The Next Level Theory: If movie studios see games as just one more medium to ransack for "pre-sold" properties, game companies see movies as just one more way of differentiating their products in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

"We're taking our property to the next level," explains Capcom's Aida, the licensing executive behind the Street Fighter movie project. "When you play the game, you cannot relate to a character as anything other than a computer-graphic warrior. When you watch Jean-Claude as Guile, West Studi as Sagat, or Raul Julia as Bison, you walk out of the theater with a completely different feeling. After experiencing the live-action movie, our Street Fighter players will go back and play with a different feel. Guile will be someone they know."

But is that what players want from a game? Does it "enhance game play" to know where your character works during the day?

The Tennis Racquet Theory: A relatively disinterested view from a game-business veteran, comes from Rob Fulop of PF Magic, which makes the 3-D fighting game Ballz (no movie deal).

"Stories and games depend on completely different processing centers," says Fulop. "When you play a game 10,000 times, the graphics become invisible. It's all impulses. It's not the part of your brain that processes plot, character, story.

"If you watch a movie, you become the hero – Gilgamesh, Indiana Jones, James Bond, whomever. The kid says, I want to be that. In a game, Mario isn't a hero. I don't want to be him; he's me. Mario is a cursor. Maybe you do want to be the Street Fighter guys – I don't know their names, Kung Wo, whatever – but I think they're more like your tennis racquet. When I play against you, I play me using the Kung Wo racquet.

"Now, when they do the next Street Fighter game after the movie, and the characters are exactly the same guys, if I can play the game cleverly and resolve the movie differently, that's a cool thing. Obviously somebody's going to win this big street fight in the movie. And it's probably going to be Jean-Claude – what a surprise! But if, depending on how good the players are, a different guy wins, that's cool. But that's not going to happen on the big screen, it'll happen on the little local screen, the game screen."

How would Fulop want to see one of his games adapted for the movies? "I frankly have no idea. Because we have no characters – our characters are so shallow. And we have no plot. So what goes? The theme. And the name.''

The Serial Encounter Theory: This scholarly view is proffered by Marsha Kinder, a professor of critical studies at the University of Southern California. In her pop-culture analysis Playing with Power, published in 1991 Kinder wrote: "Children of my generation were usually introduced to the moving image when our parents first took us to the cinema; thus moviegoing tended to remain for us a rich source of fantasy. But to kids who are raised on television, moviegoing frequently translates into a frightening loss of power. In contrast to television, the oversized movie images and overbearing sounds demand their undivided attention for long stretches of time and deprive them, not only of control over what they perceive, but also of periodic retreat into a comforting domestic background."

What does Kinder think about the new game-based movies?

"The real problem with something like Mortal Kombat is that its genre is one-on-one serial combat. It'll be very interesting to see what kind of narrative they put forth. It's not as if there aren't any precedents for one-on-one serial encounters in movies, but they haven't been fighting movies – they've been psychological dramas like Ingmar Bergman films. And, of course, pornography."

For that reason, Flint Dille – screenwriter (An American Tail: Fievel Goes West), game designer, and self-labeled "multimedia guerrilla" – suggests that Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat would make a better TV series than a movie: "Every episode, a different guy could win. That could sustain something like this, keep it alive."

The Theory of Respect: Dille reminds me that creative attitude counts for a lot.

"The closest metaphor for this is turning comic books into movies. And where that goes awry, nine times out of ten, is that the people assigned to do it have no respect for the material, or have a condescending attitude toward it. I don't think the Super Mario movie was made by anyone who had sat down and gotten a great deal of joy playing that game. They just wouldn't have made that movie."

It's time, clearly, to talk to some people who really respect their games.

On a warm Sunday afternoon, I visit the Namco Cyberstation arcade at San Francisco's Pier 39. Outside, a mariachi band's trumpets warble, and tourists down chowder, pretzels, popcorn. Inside, children line up for the bumper-car ride, while the videogame screens cycle through their come-ons. The din is deafening.

Over at the Mortal Kombat console, the game is demanding: Finish him. An older kid shows a younger boy how.

I ask them if they know there's a Mortal Kombat movie on its way.

"Unh-unh."

Would they want to see it?

"Dunno." "Maybe." "Wanna play?"

Clearly, this is not going to be an in-depth interview. I accept the older one's challenge and put a couple of tokens in the machine.

Thwack! Thud!

Finish him.

Before I can even figure out the controls, I'm dog meat.

Whatever the commercial logic of adapting games into movies, perhaps there's a deeper psychic logic. Whether you view these games as engines of kid empowerment or just think they're brain-numbing exercises in video violence, you can't escape the fact that kids are really good at them. Your average 10-year-old can whip your average adult's butt. When you translate the game into the familiar idiom of an action movie, you return it to a medium that's entirely adult-produced, adult-defined and adult-run.

Turning games into movies is certainly about selling stuff to kids; there's no denying that. But maybe – on some level that no one in the business is likely to examine – it's also about making grown-ups feel safer in a world they can't control.

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